The Neglected Majority: Essays in Canadian Women's History, Volume 2

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

This second volume of essays in Canadian women’s history, edited by Susan Mann Trofimenkoff (University of Ottawa) and Alison Prentice (OISE) shows clearly how women’s history changes the discipline: by introducing elements so far ignored, women’s history changes the description of the past, with the aim of bringing about changes in the present and in the future.

Women’s history taps sources left unused by male history. Thus, Marta Danylewycz, to whose memory the volume is dedicated, analyzes the nun-laywoman relationships in early twentieth century Montreal. Marilyn Barber reviews the struggle of female domestics in Ontario (1870-1930). Agnus McLaren investigates the history of abortion; Gail Cuthbert Brandt studies the decline of political militancy among female workers in the Quebec cotton industry, during the first half of the twentieth century. Susan Walsh retraces the ideological paths of Dorothy Gretchen Steeves and of Grace McInnis, those two socialist and feminist rebels. Marjorie Griffin Cohen examines women’s contribution to Canadian dairying. Jan Noel speaks of the “femmes favorisées” of New France, a group that played a major role in the colonial economy. Margaret Conrad uncovers valuable documents of women’s culture in her study of the diaries and correspondence of Maritime women. The bibliography that completes the volume sheds new light on Canadian history and provides Canadian women with information that, without the work of female historians, would have remained unknown to them.

The articles fit into five areas of concern: the women’s movement; women’s work; ideology, culture, and education; women and the family; women’s health and sexuality. Trofimenkoff, Prentice, and their collaborators contribute immensely to the body of knowledge with regard to these areas and to the understanding of women’s lives.

The essays make for good reading even by non-historians, and this is important: women’s history, as an academic subject, must be presented in a way that makes it accessible to the general reader. Only in that way can our understanding of women’s past progress with some speed. For so long we have known so little about ourselves and our past: while present research must be thorough and careful, its results must reach as many people as possible in order to provoke a re-shaping of the world in not too distant a future.